


the birds and the bees are getting older now

by grenadier (5H4E)



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-All That Remains, at worst, the Amell-Hawke family are bad at dealing with grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-13 19:52:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16024814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/5H4E/pseuds/grenadier
Summary: There’s a cold breeze blowing over my soul.(Gamlen and Marian deal with Leandra's death. By that I mean they don't deal with it at all.)





	the birds and the bees are getting older now

He finds her, hours after the end of it all, in front of the flickering embers of the fireplace. She’s curled up on the old cushioned settle, stripped of her robes and left in a soft looking chemise, knees brought up to her chest, bare feet poking out from under her skirt.

She looks younger now then he’s ever seen her before. Resigned, in a way. It’s at odds with the assortment of bottles surrounding her, the stained goblet on the floor, and yet, _this_ he understands.

Gamlen seats himself beside his niece. He tries, fails, to think of something to say to her, and then, when he cannot, he picks up her abandoned goblet, and helps himself to her wine, the dark red with the Tevinter label.

This is the hard part, and Gamlen does what he always does when faced with something difficult — he drinks. The wine is aged, probably expensive, and he runs his tongue over his teeth to savour the taste when he swallows. “She could’ve—” he starts, thinking about flowers, and the look on Leandra’s face when she’d told him all about her suitor, and his laughingly asking her if he needed to help her slip away to meet him again, _like last time_. There’s a voice, at the back of his head, and it sounds like his own: _your fault._

“Is this the part where you tell me it’s all my fault?” She snaps, staring into the fire, all hard edges like always, and he sags into the settle.

“If you’d been quicker—” he catches himself, watches the way Marian’s lip trembles. He has these images in his head, of his sister being brutalised, and Marian, who is more blunt-force trauma than a person half the time, who has run a trail of blood through Kirkwall from day one, not being able to reach her. His insides twist, spitefully, at her guilt, at his easy way out of assuming responsibility for yet another failing. Marian is crying, now.

He doesn’t know what to say. Marian has never, in all the time she has lived in Kirkwall, come to him with her troubles. The most emotion he’s ever seen on her had been her holding her brothers hand when they thought nobody was looking, when he’d argued with Leandra back in Lowtown. That scrap of a girl, with her coarse dark hair and those freckles, who’d nailed a sickle to the end of her staff and butchered her way into Kirkwall, who still hasn’t lost her Fereldan accent after all these years.

She looks up at him, looking so desperately lost and out of place that it throws him.

Her pretty eyes. Blue eyes; _Malcolm’s_ eyes. Watery with tears. Gamlen finishes his drink, licks his lips, and awkwardly wraps an arm around her shoulders. When she turns, curling into him, pressing her wet mouth to his throat in shuddering breaths, and her fingers — sticky with grenadine, a gift from that pirate slut — grabbing at him, he only pulls her closer, because she is warm, and sweet-smelling, and Malcolm isn’t here to protect her.

Because if he can’t hurt Malcolm, he can do the next best thing, and if she wants to cry on someone’s shoulder, he will not disallow her, no matter how unwise that is.

Her breath is hot against his collar; she stays there for a moment too long, leaning against him, feeling small like he’s never really thought of her before. He can feel the outline of her against his side, her sinewy figure, mage-soft, the beginnings of the small curve of the side of her breast; it’s been a long time — he’s not been with anyone, not properly, not outside of whores at the Blooming Rose, since _Mara,_ and that’s a wound he’s right about ready to pick the scab of right now.

Gamlen rubs his hand down her arm, past the fabric of her sleeve, until he comes to meet her skin, and she startles at that, just a little, like she didn’t mean to.

“Hey, girl,” he mutters, voice coming out harsher than he intended, and he feels Marian shift. He slackens his hold on her, expecting her to pull away; if he tries to hold her down, then she’ll try to run, and he trusts nothing so much as he trusts that she could kill him if she wanted.

“Shut up,” is her response, and he watches her stretch her legs, spread one over his lap, watches the fabric ride up to show more and more of the pale skin of her left leg before she’s straddling him, and pressing her face to his collar. Her hair is falling about his face, falling into his mouth, and it smells of wildflowers, like nothing out of Lowtown.

His hand slides up, under the thin fabric of her dress, and grips the soft meat of her thigh, fingers digging in just _enough_ ; not enough to hurt, only to hold her steady.  

She brings her left hand up, wraps it around his neck to hold him in place, and presses her thumb to the centre of his throat.

Marian is so close that it’s near suffocating. He places a hand on the small of her back, pulls her in, until he feels the curve of her stomach against him, feels that warm press of her chest against his, feels something low and deep tighten and clench, and he feels this compulsion to gather her hair in his fist.

They are silent for a moment, save for Marian’s whimpering. She doesn’t so much cry as she does pant out heavy, rattling gasps, like it’s a fight to allow herself this moment of weakness. Gamlen has to wonder if she did this with her father when she was a little girl, upset over some inconsequential trifle; he wonders if Malcolm is watching them now, from wherever he is, Fade or elsewhere. His fingers trace over the bumps of Marian’s spine, through the fabric of her dress.

She murmurs something against his collar, but Gamlen can’t understand her, and when he grunts a “what, girl?” she presses her mouth to his throat, and it feels less like a kiss, and more like she had intended to bite him and had thought better of it at the last moment.

He withdraws his hand from her back, and reaches for her with his free hand, finding her jaw. Her cheeks are wet, but he doesn’t really know what to do about that.

She gasps, mouth open with his thumb tugging on her bottom lip, and her eyes wide. There’s the brown in her left eye — that vertical, split-in-half iris, deep brown like his own, like Leandra’s.

She wriggles in his lap, pressing herself closer, tangling her hand in the coarse fabric of his shirt to pull him closer, and he remembers, belatedly, through the fogginess of wine-infused bitter grief, that Marian is his _niece_. More than that, she is Leandra’s _child_.

“Marian,” he croaks, feeling cold all of a sudden. He holds her at a distance, despite her trembling, and takes in the blotchiness of her skin, the ugly red flush that crying has given her, the fat in her cheeks from youth, and he wants nothing more than to throw her off of him. He pulls his hand from her thigh sharply, and guides her off of his lap. “Come on, now, girl,” he says, firmly, and she moves willingly, mouth agape, like she’s been hit by one of her stunning spells.

He leaves her sitting there, looking shocked, when he goes to find the dwarf manservant she’s picked up from Maker knows where, and tells him to send for the apostate boy Marian is so fond of.

He leaves without saying goodbye, and takes the bottle of Tevinter red with him as he steps out into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> look as i was writing this ‘you don’t own me’ came on, and i was drinking peach schnapps, and it just sort of took a Turn.
> 
> whilst gamlen was never going to actually act on any urges he might have, he is someone who does ask v. invasive questions about his niece/nephew’s sex life (to the point of making isabela uncomfortable) and he does apparently spread info about their sex life according to varric. so, u know. propriety. 
> 
> marian is a deeply instinctual being who is governed entirely by emotions and who tries very, very hard to repress them, despite them constantly bubbling up like a self-destructive wellspring. i honestly don’t think she had any sexual intentions here – she would crawl into malcolm’s lap as a little girl to cry, and in a moment of deep, irrecoverable emotional trauma she attempts to seek out the same thing from the only person in her life who could possible fill the role of older male family member. add to that the fact that marian’s spent the last how many years with only leandra as a form of emotional, familial support, and leandra’s done a whole lot of blaming marian slash ignoring marian’s needs and desires, so we come to a point where marian’s just desperate for affection. propriety!!
> 
> also a note on the mention of carver: i don’t mean to imply anything more than the fact that the hawke sibs, post blight/bethany’s death, don’t really have the healthiest way of dealing with grief, and they’re p. co-dependent. they’re not incestuous by any means, but they are uncomfortably close at times. again: marian has bad familial relationships and also is desperate for affection.


End file.
